Ed Moke, VP

Thursday, April 5 at 11 am ET, 4 pm BST

Many organizations face challenges in managing unstructured data on file shares. Managing unstructured data does not mean moving it to an archive like SharePoint, but managing it in place streaming support for governance and privacy initiatives, including the EU GDPR.

Join us Tuesday, March 6 at 2 pm ET, 11 am PT for a special web event

Organizations struggle with governance initiatives due to lack of knowledge of their data assets. What exists? Why does it exist? Does it have value? Is it sensitive? Who can access it? Does it contain personal data or PII?

The first step in implementing a sound data governance strategy is classifying data. Data classification will answer many of the above questions, as well as enable a sound migration and management strategy to be deployed.

New Three-Month Program Helps Organizations Support Unstructured Data Classification in Support of Compliance with Governance and Privacy Initiatives.

HOLMDEL, NJ – Information management software company Index Engines announced the Governance Readiness Starter Bundle Wednesday, a rapidly deployable 3-month software and services solution that empowers clients to get started in classifying unstructured user data in support of industry regulations and compliance requirements, including the upcoming GDPR.

The Governance Readiness Starter Bundle includes metadata classification of unstructured files where data is organized based on value, including the tagging of redundant obsolete and trivial (ROT) content that no longer has business value. Following this three-month jumpstart, additional software and services can be deployed to provide more comprehensive solutions, including data migration and minimization as well as full-content search and archiving.

“This bundle is designed to help organizations understand their data assets, so they can clean and classify them to prepare for the GDPR and other governance initiatives,” Index Engines Vice President Jim McGann said. “With the GDPR just months away and many organizations unsure of where to start, this program is that starting point and can easily be expanded to satisfy the challenges faced with respect to unstructured data management.”

Index Engines’ engineers remotely manage the project and work with the organization throughout the 90-day process.

This 3-month term license provides all the software and services you need to get started and manage a 50TB ($18,150), 100TB ($27,200) or 250TB ($49,300) project within the data center. Following this 3-month term clients can transition to additional capacity and licensing terms.

“When we talk to organizations who want to start a governance initiative, they never know where to start. The Governance Readiness Start Bundle empowers organizations to look at high-risk file servers like the finance server or a file share server and understand what data exists and start the cleanup process,” McGann said. “Our software along with the professional services bundled in makes compliance possible at a reasonable price without taxing company personnel.”

Memories of this event flooded back to me after reading Gartner’s How to Implement File Analysis for GDPR Challenges, a wakeup call for IT infrastructure and operations leaders everywhere. I live in the circus of data governance, where the balancing act is the competing agendas of your compliance and IT organizations, the risks are legal and regulatory, and the stakes are the life of your company.

Organizations are looking to modernize, automate and transform IT and Data Protection to make Digital Transformation real. Legacy backup software is holding them back because of the need to maintain access to long-term retention (LTR) data. Organizations are utilizing backup tapes in support of their LTR requirements, but archiving these legacy tapes to offsite storage and saving everything doesn’t solve retention requirements and ensure compliance.

Using tape for LTR is an expensive and risky strategy. You must:

Maintain backup media and restoration servers,

Pay legacy backup vendors expensive software maintenance fees,

Save everything – even data you shouldn’t – indefinitely, and

Wait months to find data needed for the GDPR, compliance and legal requests.

Dell EMC and Index Engines have a solution to eliminate legacy tape infrastructure, migrate data of value to low-cost cloud solutions, and deploy a more intelligent LTR archive that will meet the demands of today’s regulatory environment. This allows customers to feel confident they can move forward with their Data Protection transformation strategy while still providing access to the LTR data

Register below to join us Tuesday, November 14 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT to discover:

Smarter, faster, cheaper alternatives to backup tape,

A plan to retire legacy catalogs, recoup costs and migrate data to the cloud, and

If you are like most corporations preparing for the GDPR, knowing what exists, knowing if it has business value, if it should exist, and if and where it should be retained and archived is a challenging task. Add in a compliance deadline just months away and the GDPR becomes overwhelming and expensive.

Consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal and information management company Index Engines have collaborated to help organizations develop a smarter GDPR and information management strategy, one with an attached ROI through ROT clean up.

During this 30 minute web event, learn how technology, people and processes can be applied to help companies understand what they have, manage it more effectively and protect themselves from the risk and costs of the GDPR, by:

Classifying unstructured data into manageable categories: ROT, Out of Scope, In Scope

Search and find personal and sensitive data to support the regulation

Manage the disposition of responsive content using a defensible process

Join us Wednesday, Sept. 27 at 2 pm ET/ 11 am PT to learn more.

Data grows at a rate of 40-60% each year, but as capacity is expanded, redundant, obsolete and trivial user data – ROT – is clogging corporate networks. resulting in unnecessary risk and expense. When combined with unknown PII, PSTs and sensitive content, the cost becomes even greater.

Classifying and managing this data is the key to smarter data management.

Companies using legacy backup tapes for long term retention of key business records could see a 76% cost savings in just three years by having Index Engines migrate this content from tape to AWS.

HOLMDEL, NJ–Information management company Index Engines is delivering a cost-effective solution to migrate data of value from legacy backup tapes to the AWS Cloud.

Index Engines eliminates the need for the legacy backup software and provides an intelligent migration path to AWS. This facilitates improved access and management of the content as well as the retirement of the legacy tapes and infrastructure, saving significant data center expenses.

Current ROI analysis show a potential of up to 76% savings* after three years based on current maintenance, offsite storage, eDiscovery service provider and associated legacy backup data fees.

“Our customers want to access their corporate data including valuable intellectual property that is hidden on offline tapes,” said Sabina Joseph, Head of Global Storage Partnerships and Alliances, Amazon Web Services. “Index Engines makes it possible to move a single-instance or culled data set of data from legacy tape onto AWS so it can be accessed anytime, anywhere by legal teams or any knowledge workers who can benefit from the data assets.”

Index Engines simplifies migration of data from legacy backup tapes to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A culled data set, or single instance of the tape contents, is migrated ensuring all metadata remains forensically sound.

The native deduped data, including unstructured files, email and databases, is stored in AWS. A metadata or full content index is available to search, manage based on retention policies, and access so data can be quickly retrieved based on business needs.

The costs and risks associated with leaving “dark” and unknown user data on legacy backup tapes is significant and goes well beyond the compliance and regulatory risks of not knowing what exists, including:

Old backup software maintenance costs as well as the manpower required to support it

Aged libraries and media servers under maintenance

Offsite tape storage costs and retrieval fees

eDiscovery restore requests by expensive service providers for specific files or user mailboxes

Hidden intellectual property and business assets that are not leveraged

Index Engines supports access to and migration from all common backup formats.

“Legacy backup tapes are hard to access, impossible to search and expensive to restore, yet they contain vital corporate records that must be preserved to meet legal and regulatory requirements,” Index Engines CEO Tim Williams said. “We’re excited to work with AWS to make that data accessible, responsive and governable.”

Index Engines provides a number of flexible pricing models that allow organizations to implement the solution in their data center or ship tapes to a secure Index Engines certified processing lab.

When deploying inside the firewall, the technology can be managed by internal resources or via Index Engines remote Assurance Program. The Assurance Program provides all the technical resources necessary to successfully execute a tape to AWS migration from remotely installing the software, to processing the tapes and migrating data of value to the cloud.

A federal court in Washington ruled in favor of Franciscan Health System’s motion to not produce data from backup tapes as it was expensive and not easily accessible.

Franciscan Health claimed it would need to restore, search and review data from 100 backup tapes, which at 14 hours of labor per tape would require 1,400 hours and $157,500 in costs. That’s over $1,500 a tape to discover and collect the responsive ESI! You can read more about the case on Lexology.com.

Index Engines’ Data Processing Lab recently performed a very similar job that required 25 mailboxes be restored from 100 tapes. The job was completed in 20 hours for less than $30,000. That’s a couple of days compared to many months of effort and for a fraction of the cost.

The Index Engines approach to tape is fundamentally different and less expensive from traditional restoration services. A simple scan of the tape allows full content or metadata search and reporting on the tape contents. Quickly find what is needed, whether it is a user mailbox, single file, entire directory or more. This content, and only this content, is then restored back online quickly and reliably.

Even when both parties “did not dispute that its backup tapes would contain at least some emails that were discoverable under Rule 26(b)(1)” the court once again fell for the burden argument and moved forward without doing a little research on how technology exists to circumvent the burdensome nature of backup tapes.